I've been waiting for this since I bought BTP last year. The one thing that is a bit unexpected is having to manually go into the inventory "page" and manually telling it that it's time to deduct certain things.

I understand the purpose. There ultimately has to be a way to commit a recipe or otherwise tell BTP that you're not just messing around with a recipe but rather are dedicating some ingredients.

I've been trying to think of a more intuitive way this could work because it's not quite there IMHO. First, is there any way to tell which recipes have been "commited" from an inventory perspective? I thought that maybe a check box on the recipe itself (accessible from both in the "My recipes" browser and the GUI itself that says "affect inventory". It could then be checked when you decide that you are absolutely going to brew this one (as opposed to a draft). Then if you later decide to scrap the idea, you can uncheck it and it goes back into inventory like it never happened.

In the current setup, how would one right the inventory when you decide NOT to brew a recipe after telling it to deduct (aside from manually increasing the quantities?

I just downloaded the test, and am playing with it now. I noticed that in the recipie menu, there's a shopping list/inventory selection. This brings up a dialog that allows you to deduct the current recipe from inventory and create a shopping list of the ingredients you need. This seems to fulfill the function of removing a recipe's ingredients from inventory. haven't seen a function to restore ingredients yet, though.

I asked this same question earlier today and was informed on how to add actual amounts to your shopping list/inventory.
This is done by clicking in the My Ingredients item such as grains. In the top portion of the main interface your inventory items are displayed.
To the far right of this display, you can enter the amount of grains...hops..etc. This is where you make your adjustments and it will appear in the shopping list dialog where you can deduct the amounts from any recipe that you are planning to brew.

Personally.....I use a separate spreadsheet to keep my inventory as it is a lot less time consuming and a lot easier for me.

The Inventory function seems to work ok here however I have noted a few thing s I found annoying
1. I now have no way to replace recipe items directly any more.
2. When viewing the shopping list the inventory for the water salts does not appear on the shopping list.
otherwise it seems to be just what I was waiting for.

The feature is surely a welcomed addition but I'm asking you to think more about it. Yes, I figured out how to tell the software to "make it so" or commit the ingredients to the inventory/shopping list. The button is there.

It's just that when you have a few recipies on deck, there has to be some mechanism that considers them all as they pull from your inventory prior to brewing. If you're used to planning a single recipe, brewing, then planning another, then brewing in that cycle, this potential issue would never affect you.

Just as an example, let's say you have a simple inventory of 20 lbs of 2 row and 5 oz of cascade and you plan the following three brews, one per week.

Ok, due to the simplicity, we can all see that I'm 4lbs short on grain and 1oz short on hops. Now we have to question when is it an appropriate time to delete these items from inventory.

If you subtract from inventory as you brew, you won't really notice the shortcoming until after you brew #2.

If you do it as you're creating the recipes, you are commiting ingredients to a recipe you may never brew. It would at least be nice to have an indicator on each recipe to show whether or not that recipe had been commited or "affected" the inventory or not and have a way to undo it.

1. You populate all your supplies into the inventory list along with quanitities (BTP1.5 does this fine).

2. You craft a recipe. Maybe some items are in stock, others are not, either way. Also covered in 1.5.

3. You MIGHT craft another recipe to pull from stock.

Now, the issue I have comes in knowing which ingredients are already commited to a given recipe. The way it's built now, you open a recipe, go into the inventory/shopping list window and you can see how that recipe is affect the inventory. Ok, so now if you want to commit to brewing that recipe, you click "deduct from inventory". The problem is, this is irreversible. If you actually decide to nix this recipe indefinitely, the items don't go back into inventory. There's also no way to keep track of which recipes have been committed to the inventory (or I should say vice versa as well). It would be nice to be able to go into inventory and see how a given stock may already be divied up to various ON-DECK recipes. It's key to be able to uncommit items.

Am I being a little b!tch about this feature or does this make sense?

You can also sit in that inventory window and continue clicking "deduct from inventory" until you're empty.

There needs to be a way to indicate that I've done this per recipe at bare minimum. Either that or the "deduct" button needs to be greyed out after it's been clicked once.

Bobby_M wrote:It's just that when you have a few recipies on deck, there has to be some mechanism that considers them all as they pull from your inventory prior to brewing. If you're used to planning a single recipe, brewing, then planning another, then brewing in that cycle, this potential issue would never affect you.

Just as an example, let's say you have a simple inventory of 20 lbs of 2 row and 5 oz of cascade and you plan the following three brews, one per week.

Ok, due to the simplicity, we can all see that I'm 4lbs short on grain and 1oz short on hops. Now we have to question when is it an appropriate time to delete these items from inventory.

If you subtract from inventory as you brew, you won't really notice the shortcoming until after you brew #2.

If you do it as you're creating the recipes, you are commiting ingredients to a recipe you may never brew. It would at least be nice to have an indicator on each recipe to show whether or not that recipe had been commited or "affected" the inventory or not and have a way to undo it.

Maybe I'm the only one that sees this as a problem

I see where you are coming from. Maybe I am missing something but what I would want to be able to do is:

-plan several recipes at a time
-compare those against my inventory for a shopping list of necess ingredients
-purchase, add ingredients to inventory
-remove the ingredients from my inventory on brew day

I agree with your list, but with the current feature implimentation, you won't really know if your ingredients are available for the 2nd, 3rd, etc recipes because they theorhetically could have already been allocated to the first batch. The only way to keep it straight is to deduct from inventory as soon as you craft the first recipe, but not on brew day.

Bobby_M wrote:I agree with your list, but with the current feature implimentation, you won't really know if your ingredients are available for the 2nd, 3rd, etc recipes because they theorhetically could have already been allocated to the first batch. The only way to keep it straight is to deduct from inventory as soon as you craft the first recipe, but not on brew day.

What I would want to be able to do and can do are two different things

Short of that, queuing brews and being able to take their ingredients out of the queue would be ok.

There was a post in Dec 2006 on the call for inventory feature suggestions that is very similar to what I'm talking about:

About automatically deducting as ingredients are used, that can be tricky. I would not want it to reduce the inventory before I actually brew and use the ingredients. On the other hand, if I preplan all of my brew sessions for the upcoming month, it would be nice if my inventory were somehow marked to reflect that those ingredients are "allocated". That way, for example, if I create 3 recipes one night for my next 3 beers, I would like for BTP to warn me that the first two sessions will use up my EKG hops, not leaving me enough for my third. I'll also add that I don't like the "Final" concept in ProMash's inventory, because there is no way to undo the Final, and if you copy an old session file to use as a starting point for a new one, it will already be marked as Final and won't allow deducting from the inventory. I hope that Final concept can be avoided in BTP, or at least that it be reversible later. I guess what I'm thinking is something like a "Deduct from Inventory" button, when clicked it updates the inventory db and locks the recipe's ingredients from future edits, and enables some "Undo deductions" button that would replace the ingredients in the inventory and unlock the recipe.

This guy had it right. I guess I'm just looking for more people, including the admins/BTP guys to validate these concerns or at least confirm that I'm being understood and practical. If you tell me that this is the best you can do on this feature, that's okay I guess. I'll just have to be more rigid in my brewing habits and add text to my notes like "REMEMBER< you already deducted the inventory on this one".

I organize my recipes into "recipe", "scheduled", and "made" folders. (well, I have more catagories, but you get the idea.)
I don't deduct ingredients until the recipe makes it into the "made" folder, but you could deduct them when moving to the scheduled folder.

If you decide not to go ahead with the beer, you'd need to re-add the ingredients 1 at a time, but it might work around your current issue.

Edit: Another idea is to wait until you deduct the ingredients to date the recipe, as an indicator.

Last edited by slothrob on Thu Mar 13, 2008 5:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Bobby_M wrote:I've been waiting for this since I bought BTP last year. The one thing that is a bit unexpected is having to manually go into the inventory "page" and manually telling it that it's time to deduct certain things.

I understand the purpose. There ultimately has to be a way to commit a recipe or otherwise tell BTP that you're not just messing around with a recipe but rather are dedicating some ingredients.

I've been trying to think of a more intuitive way this could work because it's not quite there IMHO. First, is there any way to tell which recipes have been "commited" from an inventory perspective? I thought that maybe a check box on the recipe itself (accessible from both in the "My recipes" browser and the GUI itself that says "affect inventory". It could then be checked when you decide that you are absolutely going to brew this one (as opposed to a draft). Then if you later decide to scrap the idea, you can uncheck it and it goes back into inventory like it never happened.

In the current setup, how would one right the inventory when you decide NOT to brew a recipe after telling it to deduct (aside from manually increasing the quantities?

I did an extensive overhaul of the inventory features in BTP for release 1.5.3. The most prominent change is reflected in how BTP views inventory. It is no longer handled on an individual recipe level, rather, the user adds recipes to the "Planned Recipes" folder to indicate which recipes potentially will draw from inventory. When using the shopping list window, the user can compare planned recipes with those he wishes to "assemble," whether from inventory or the supplier.

There are two columns in the shopping list window that can be edited to reflect how many batches are planned and how many are being assembled for each recipe in the list. Editing these values will adjust the ingredient list quantities in the listbox below. The lists can be sorted by column and then printed to provide a combined shopping list for taking to the store.

Hopefully these improvements provide a more flexible way to track inventory and generate shopping list reports. More features are planned, such as drag-n-drop of recipes on the "My Ingredients" folder to convert entire recipes to inventory items. The biggest logistical hurdle for inventory is matching inventory ingredients to recipe ingredients. If the user makes minor adjustments to an ingredient in a recipe, the ingredient is no longer the same as the one in the DB. Thus, tools to help in the selection of substitute ingredients for converting recipes to those that use only ingredients in the user's DB are planned as well.